Leither Yiltron
Expert Intervention
Caldari State
848
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Posted - 2014.02.19 03:02:00 -
[1] - Quote
Spartacus Dust wrote:Mine as well, but they can't verify multiple account manipulation, I know people who have like 5 Dust accounts.
There has been some extensive discussion about this in other places and by other people who have probably explored the topic better than I'm about to, but I thought I'd throw in on this despite the importance of an election details announcement from CCP soon.
The point of a mechanic to weed out alt votes is not to perfectly and without fail guarantee that every vote cast represents a physical player. As many people have pointed out, doing so on the platform we're using is essentially impossible. No matter what rules and regulations are implemented to that end it's a safe bet that a sufficiently determined miscreant can get around them. The objective here is to minimize the number of replicated votes to an acceptable level with the smallest effort (CCP resource wise).
A basic way to keep the number of replicated accounts low involves tracking actual labor invested through secondary metrics and making sure that each qualified voter has put a minimum amount of labor into Dust. Sure, the metrics used can be "gamed". Any threshold system can be gamed by trying to raise as many accounts as possible to that threshold rather than playing on a single account. If it's time-consuming to get there though, most people will be discouraged from trying.
I think this is exactly the type of method CCP will use. If it were me I'd be aiming to figure out if a particular account had approximately 1-3 months of play time for approval. Yes, it will disenfranchise some very new players, but the alternative is much worse. Let's look at Eve's system as an example:
In Eve the primary CSM election restriction is that your account be subscribed to the game. Subscribing costs roughly $25-$30 per two accounts for one month. Or you can subscribe an account with a PLEX bought in-game. Can you game the system by subbing extra accounts the month of the CSM elections? Abso-effing-lutely. I'm pretty sure that it happens to some extent every year. The problem is that it's really expensive for the return on investment. Not only are you paying $25 for a few extra votes to select a representative for a video game (this isn't going to help you much in real life), but you could have also used that $25 on so many other things. For instance, 1 month of additional game time in Eve.
The argument that this can't be translated to Dust doesn't hold much water. $25 here isn't a stand-in to represent purchasing power so much as it is to represent labor. Not many people are willing to invest $25 of their labor, in-game or out of game, on having more votes in the CSM election. The return on the investment is simply too low. Even viewed as a votes/hour calculation it's more cost-efficient to go out and persuade players to vote for you than to earn money to spin off alt accounts.
The analog I expect CCP to use for Dust is primarily number of hours played in battles or something similar. Can you afk farm that? Yes you can, but you have to tie up an entire PS3 system to do that. It simply won't be worth it to most people to afk farm Dust for multiple tens of hours just so that they can have a handful of votes more for the CPM elections. Frankly it shouldn't be worth the cost of the energy it takes to run the PS3.
On the topic at hand: Yeah I'm crossing my fingers that the higher-ups give Saberwing enough breathing room to get all of the elections details locked down and announced with time to spare. Then again my fingers might be stuck that way after the last 2 years. 
Have a pony
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